Search Current Archives Announcements About Register Login Materiality in Portuguese Cinema: aesthetics, practices and techniques 2020-09-08 In the last decades, the consolidation of a material culture studies paradigm, in the anthropological sphere, encouraged an interest in the material dimension of human activities (Lemonnier 2012). On the other hand, within media studies, the digital turn has drawn the attention of researchers to a variety of issues related to techniques and practices of cinematic experience (Elsaesser 2016). These two axes can converge and make a significant contribution to cinema studies, both in a historical and theoretical sense. This thematic dossier proposes to look at objects and material actions that support film production and reception for the purpose of highlighting the agency of the objects and the complex interactions between materials, techniques and knowledge across different periods in film history. From this perspective, Portuguese cinema represents a very interesting case (Cunha 2018; Torgal. 2001; Sampaio. 2017; Vidal e Veloso 2016). Anchored to a stronger artisanal perspective when compared to other national cinemas, Portuguese cinema has always recognised the importance of materiality, being often thought of as a ‘materialist cinema’, despite the fact that studies have hitherto privileged the author dimension (Pierotti 2018). The ‘inter-artistic’ crafts have thus been put aside in favor of a conception of the director as being solely and exclusively responsible for the film. On the contrary, definitions like those of Kubelka, who defined cinematographic creation as ‘a tailor’s work in progress’ (Korossi 2016), acknowledge the action of these crafts, whereby the stone is molded into sculpture, shapeless fabric is cut into a costume, and the sounds are creatively arranged into new voices and silences... Linking materiality to a small-scale production system, what interests us is, precisely, to understand the implications of events or aesthetic phenomena included in the film, and how they serve to make 